It’s a story that captured the hearts of people across the state. A disoriented dog on the H1 Freeway results in a bittersweet ending.

For about a half hour, traffic on the H1 freeway came to a screeching halt Thursday morning.

Eventually, the little chihuahua was rescued and brought to the Hawaiian Humane Society.

“Luckily, we had such great outpouring from the news media we could get the photos out and of course we shared it on our Facebook and that helped us reunite the dog with their owner,” Hawaiian Humane Society Outreach Coordinator Natalie Lukashevsky said.

Humane Society officials say the dog had a collar, but did not have a microchip or tags with information to contact the owner.

“It’s so important to microchip our pets because that’s how we get the current up-to-date information,” Lukashevsky said.

“I think over 90 percent of our patients are chipped. We really support the microchip. It’s a long-term identification for their pet and puppies coming in and kittens coming in we always chip,” said Dr. Richard Fujie, King Street Pet Hospital.

The microchip takes a few seconds to implant and stores an id code matched with your current contact information.

“This is a permanent number,” Fujie said.

“Last year, we did have 3,000 returned to owners so that was huge,” Lukashevsky said.

Honolulu Police say there were two dogs that got loose on the freeway Thursday morning. The other one was hit by a vehicle and died.

Both pups were not microchipped and when the owner came to pick up the dog, he wanted to remain anonymous.

KHON2 visited areas near the scene of the incident and were not able to locate the owner and many people in the area do not know where the dogs came from.

“Because of that story we had a lot of hits on our Facebook. People are wondering who the owners are of this dog and luckily that owner did come forward, but had it had a microchip we would have been able to contact them right away.”

The Humane Society offers microchipping every day from noon to 4 p.m. for $15.